No Rest For The Wicked

 

- Douglas Tseng

If there’s one lesson learnt from the movies about resurrecting the dead, it’s that you better have a darn good reason for doing so. Because one never knows how the deceased would behave among the living. It isn’t something to be trifled with.

Just ask Alex Kurtzman, the uber-writer/ producer/director with massive geek appeal renowned for his association with JJ Abrams (Star Trek) and Michael Bay (Transformers), tasked with performing said miracle. However, the ‘dead’ in question isn’t really dead, more like dormant, and it isn’t a person, but a property — the 1932 horror classic The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff as an ancient Egyptian high-priest who wakes up from his centuries of slumber/captivity as the titular bandaged menace.

The Mummy was part of an onslaught of creature features released by Universal Pictures from the 1920s to the 1950s. The catelogue also included Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman and The Invisible Man. “I grew up loving the Universal movie monsters so much,” says the 43-year-old soft spoken director in a swanky suite at the Mandarin Oriental that’s been converted into an untidy temporary studio littered with unwieldy camera and lighting equipment and circuitous cables.

“The Mummy is very special to me because I remember the first time I saw Boris Karloff coming alive and how I was utterly terrified by him as a small child. But as the same, there’s something very relatable about him: His desire to connect as a human being to a world he can never be a part of is a very sympathetic thing.”

And now it’s Kurtzman’s turn to induce nightmares in a new generation of moviegoers with his take on